Taking my Due
Lessons learned too late
The day after the Saturday night I met Henry was the annual festival in the town square of that terminal Texas burg. The PTA mothers dragged card tables and paper-mâché piñatas to the center of town, displayed home-baked pies and Aunt Mae’s butter cookies and took rumpled dollar bills from sun-dried hands for chances to dunk the mayor with a perfectly placed pitch.
The high school nymphet squad marched in near-time with the practiced cacophony of the half-hearted band, swinging glittering batons high above their taunt bronzed bellies and four-foot legs. They appeared as one long, badly choreographed amphibian, winding its clumsy, serpentine way around the square. The air was thick with dubious municipal pride and dormant histories animated in impotent celebration. Families gathered at old, owned corners and friends met to dance in the freshly painted gazebo, courtesy of the local Masonic Lodge.
My uninitiated presence was among the topics volleyed with every change of partner, though I didn’t know it until much later.
Raised in the nation’s seventh largest city. I had never known of an afternoon’s run to the corner grocery — named for the second oldest family in town — to encounter naught but familiar faces. Anonymity was my mother tongue. I was on foreign soil.
